Tamil Language Guide

Official language in
India, Sri Lanka, Singapore
Script
Tamil

Where it's spoken

Tamil's official status rests on a different legal basis in each of the three countries where it holds one. India's constitution does not name a single official language for the whole country; instead it lets the legislature of a state adopt by law any language in use in that state as the state's own official language. The legislature of Tamil Nadu used this power to make Tamil the state's official language, so Tamil's official status in India is a state-level one rather than a status shared with the whole Union. In Sri Lanka, the chapter of the constitution dealing with language states outright that Tamil is an official language of the country, alongside Sinhala. In Singapore, the constitution lists Tamil as one of four official languages, together with Malay, Mandarin, and English, while separately naming Malay the national language.

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Script & pronunciation

This app's Tamil cards are written in the Tamil script, an abugida in which most letters stand for a consonant plus an inherent vowel, the same basic pattern shared by the other South and Central Asian scripts covered together with it in the Unicode Standard. Tamil descends, like the other scripts of South India, from the Brahmi script, and the two lineages are described as sharing many structural characteristics as a result. Where a plain consonant without its inherent vowel is needed, Tamil uses a mark called puḷḷi, the local name for what other Indic scripts call a virama. The Unicode Standard notes that, because the South Indian scripts were adapted for Dravidian languages rather than the Indo-Aryan languages of the north, they developed their own characteristics, and it specifically warns implementers not to assume that Tamil behaves just like Devanagari. This app's Latin-script transliterations of Tamil follow a convention, standard in Tamil linguistics, in which macrons mark long vowels and a further set of letters mark consonants Tamil distinguishes but English does not: ṭ, ṇ, and ḷ for retroflex consonants, ṉ and ṟ for the alveolar nasal and rhotic, and ḻ for a retroflex approximant distinctive to Tamil. This app's card அணுகக்கூடிய கழிவறை எங்கே இருக்கிறது? ("Where is the accessible restroom?") shows this last letter in its romanization, kaḻivaṟai.

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Grammar essentials

Tamil's basic word order is subject–object–verb, as in this app's card உங்கள் கடவுச்சீட்டை காட்டுங்கள் ("Please show your passport"), where the object கடவுச்சீட்டை ("your passport") comes before the verb காட்டுங்கள் ("show"); the card's own note points out that Tamil follows this SOV order. In place of English-style prepositions, Tamil marks a noun's role in the sentence with case suffixes attached to the noun itself; this app's card எனக்கு அணுகல் வசதிகள் உள்ள அறை தேவை ("I need a room with accessibility features") expresses the need by putting "to me" in the dative case, எனக்கு, and using தேவை ("is needed") as the predicate. Negation is commonly expressed with இல்லை, which comes after the word or clause it negates, as in this app's card குளியலறையில் சூடான தண்ணீர் இல்லை ("There is no hot water in the bathroom"). Tamil also has a wide structural gap between its literary, written register and its everyday spoken register — a difference that runs through verb endings, negation, and vocabulary, not just pronunciation, and that specialists treat as unusually wide compared with similar gaps in other languages. This app's own note on its card பை வேணுமா? ("Do you need a bag?") gives a concrete case of this gap: it explains that the literary வேண்டுமா contracts to the spoken வேணுமா, and that shop transactions like this one use the spoken form exclusively.

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Politeness & etiquette

Tamil marks politeness with a dedicated second-person pronoun: நீங்கள் (nīṅkaḷ), which is grammatically plural, serves as the polite "you" for strangers and people you have just met, in contrast to the familiar நீ used with close friends. This app's cards default to நீங்கள் when addressing someone you don't already know, as in நீங்கள் ஆங்கிலம் பேசுவீர்களா? ("Do you speak English?"), whose own note says to use நீங்கள் with strangers and to keep நீ for close friends only, and the app's own card for நீங்கள் translates it directly as "You (polite)". The same level of politeness carries over into commands: an imperative ending in -உங்கள் (-uṅkaḷ) marks a respectful request addressed to a stranger or a social superior, as in this app's card நான் காது கேட்கும் கருவி பயன்படுத்துகிறேன் — தெளிவாக பேசுங்கள் ("I use a hearing aid — please speak clearly"), whose own note explains that this suffix forms the polite imperative used for respectful requests to strangers or superiors.

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